Song In Spite of HB2

I am not watching the news We are the news the ones that break and help break laws A colleague warned me before the protest they’re taking names if you want to go quietly instead and I see job loss run rumored and rampant but I am young enough maybe naïve enough not to be afraid of nameless overhead to say areyoufuckingkiddingme at the thought of abandoning this outcry even as the campus is tight-mouthed and angry and sotiredofthegays and c a l m d o w n i t s n o t l i k e t h e y c a n e n f o r c e i t

there is no calm in our small force of power still notaprotectedclass rings out from the radio and already they are so tired of the protests facultymustcomply voices fade in and out lost from screeching justice I am louder and more awake than ever

Poet Hannah Baggott received her MFA from Oregon State University. She is interested in medical humanities, the body, the American South, and pop culture. Her work can be found or forthcoming in Bellevue Literary Review, Passages North, Ninth Letter, HOBART, [PANK], Calyx Journal, The Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, and other journals. She lives in North Carolina, where she is a Lecturer of Composition at UNC Pembroke.